The Cloth Of Vittoria

At that time, it was widely believed enlightenment could be realized through social unison. People from the different classes may have been equal by law, their difference in shape strongly suggests that they were culturally separate. Being the producers in society, the lower classes didn’t have time nor opportunity to take even the first small step towards enlightenment. The solution to this situation was to be an education. More precisely, education by their superiors, who displayed much higher levels of refinement in conduct, taste as well as knowledge. And so it was proposed that the masters would invite their servants to have dinner with them. Surely, the contact of the subordinates with the table manners and conversations of the higher class would soon enough uplift the servants to a similar level of civilization.

There were of course those who, through careful observation, readily learned to manipulate as well as their masters. This would only have produced a few more masters. And so it is very likely, the sharing of the dinner table was nothing more than a ritual table dance. The servants wouldn’t just have learned about the sensibilities and tastes of the upper classes, they would also have seen that those were made of gold. In terms of value, the unequal distribution would have remained intact, whether places were swapped or not. It remains unclear which god is depicted here.

No actual table conversations have been recorded or even remembered. This fact along with the ongoing preoccupation with the idea of equality -something that can be sensed throughout the cloth-, strongly suggests that enlightenment through dinner-conversation has indeed never been more than a ritual. Language holds the map of memory, and social order is preserved in the order of language. Whatever must have been said during dinner can only have reinforced the social order of inequality that already existed. From our contemporary perspective it is easy to see that it were the superiors who needed to take on the native tongue of the lower class and speak as the suppressed. Or more precisely, speak as those that did not accept their fate. This could not possibly have been speech, but rather a disruption of speech. The chaotic and confrontational design of the cloth provides us with ample cues that such a disruption had indeed taken place.

Around the time the people had liberated from their classes, they started to submit themselves to very strict dietary rituals. Organic bread played a key role in the way that these people tried to free themselves from the totalitarian individual that arose from this practice of extreme self-control by eating. The mouth of the bread depicted here is shaped like Wolf’s Tooth, also known as ergot, a species of fungus that lives of organic grain by mimicking its seeds. When eaten, ergot produces strong hallucinatory effects and induces what is often referred to as the ‘dancing plague’. It was thus believed that when consumed, this fungus liberated the consumer from his own totalitarian lifestyle.

It is still highly disputed if there had indeed been probiotic terrorists spreading ergot to enforce liberation, or that its spread was simply the natural consequence of the exponential growth in the use of organic strains of grain.

This depiction of signs captured in spheres suggests a growing interest in the medium of language itself. It would not be too bold to suggest that the dinner table would also have been the table used to host seances. These seances would have satisfied the growing desire for a view of language uninfluenced by the individual that is speaking. This seems to have been one of the first steps towards an understanding of language as something that is exchanged between individuals, rather than merely as a collection of signs and rules. Conversation is presented here as a series of autonomous visions, cut free from any speaker. It is therefore probable that the idea of such a form of speech was arrived at through the conduction of a seance.Of course, such a speech could not have communicated anything other than the symbology of its own practice.